Dining Services should consider daytime options

Shane Wade
Opinion Editor

For the most part, VCU Dining Services and Aramark do an effective job of providing food for 32,000 plus students, staff and faculty.

Between the Monroe Park and MCV campus, we have 24 eating options, some opening as early as 7 a.m. and staying open until 3 a.m. Students have a wide variety of eating options available to them throughout the day, payable by cash, credit, dining dollars or the valued meal swipe.

Those options, however, become severly limited between 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.

For example, if you get out of class at 12:50 p.m. and have an hour and 10 minutes until your next class at 2 :00 p.m., there are five locations where you can use your meal blocks: Croutons, Shafer Dining Court, Market 810-2-Go, Cary Street Deli or Bleecker’s. You can either wait in those long lines, scramble for $5 to $7 to spend on lunch somewhere else, hope you haven’t spent all your dining dollars at Starbucks or convince yourself to stomach Shafer. Hundreds of students with meal plans, whether they’re preferred or essential plans, are unable to use the block portions of the meal plans that they’ve already purchased anywhere else.

While it’s important for non-meal plan subscribers to also have readily available options, corralling students to particular locations only during certain hours is unfair; they’ve already paid into the system and should have an increased, if not unlimited, reign of where and when their meal plan is applicable.

This isn’t some petty grudge about being stubborn or overly picky about lunchtime meals. It’s about students having a say in the choices available to them. After all, we’ve already forked over hundreds of dollars for our dining plans; shouldn’t they be flexible to what we, as consumers, want? Or is this a case of Dining Services pulling a, to quote Charlie Sheen, “I’ve already got your money, dude.”

In an article published two weeks ago in the Commonwealth Times, Dan McDonald, assistant director of VCU business services, commented on how students would miss Quizno’s “availability of meal swipes.”

It’s also important to note that this new Starbucks lacks the versatility of the others because students are unable to use dining dollars there. That means one less location where students can get food between their lunchtime classes and one more location line rush for “swipeable” places like Croutons.

Again and again, Dining Services opens new locations, much to the acclaim of the student body, only for us to be disappointed by the limited hours (Einstein Bagels & Co) or quality of food (Zoca’s). While they do a fantastic job of handling customer complaints, making menu adjustments and responding to student comments, we still have to deal with 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. food rushes. We’re still dealing with the same problems and making the same complaints that we have in the past.

A few awards for excellence in dining in the past doesn’t keep students from striving for excellence in both food quality and food service.

Dining Services should be applauded for their past efforts in prioritizing student needs, particularly with addressing customer complaints and the request for healthier food options, but it’s our job, as both students and consumers, to voice our opinions and self-advocate for changes we’d like to see, particularly in such an expansive and expensive service.